Arts & Culture

Welcome, the Bagel Emoji

Have you heard the good news? Starting later this year, when you text your friends asking to go out for a bagel brunch, there will be a bagel emoji to help you emphasize your point.

Is the new icon the most robust looking of bagels? Well, no, as The Forward angrily points out. There’s nary a poppy nor sesame seed in sight, no cream cheese or lox spread, and the poor thing is thin, the kind you would get from a coffee chain, not your New York deli.

But the bagel has long been dead (long live the bagel). Just be grateful the emoji wasn’t a rainbow bagel monstrosity.

Besides, the bagel emoji is so versatile! You now have the perfect emoji for being bageled— that is, when a person realizes that you’re Jewish and makes a faux-casual comment at you that is really intended to communicate that they know you’re Jewish.

Another suggestion: Let’s make the bagel the new taco/peach emoji. Jewish ladies— you know what I’m talking about. The emoji even features two halves of a bagel lying together— it should be the main emojis for wlw.

So many possibilities! But this begs the question, now that we finally have a foothold in the emoji world (premium poorly rated add-on apps do not count), what Jewish symbols should come next?

A Torah— Duh. It’s the single greatest shared piece of iconography among all Jewish people. (That said— would the emoji be a Sephardic or Ashkenazi Torah? Best have both to be on the safe side.)

Matzo— Yes, it’s seasonal, but just picture the string of matzo emojis you’ll be sending out by the third day of the holiday when you’re so sick of the stuff you’ll explode.

A kippah— Let’s be real, it will probably look terrible as an image the size of your pinky nail, but there are already like, four hat options. We can make it work.

Shabbat candles— Does using this emoji count as lighting candles on Friday night? Yes, it absolutely would.

Guilt— The smilies include a smug cat, but none of them even come close to capturing the feeling that you’re disappointing your parents.

Obvi, send us your own ideas for Jewish emojis, so that we can work towards a universal language of symbols that simultaneously speaks to a wide variety of cultures and also creates homogeneity as we gradually gravitate towards some kind of singularity, probably controlled by either Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.